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SECTION 3.

Reasons for Lack of Interest

Questions were asked to study this problem from two points of view, they were: Question 10 “Is there any reason why you have never listened to them” (the 8.15 food talks) and Question 12 “Why have you given up listening to them”?

Reasons for Never listening to the Kitchen Front

Question 9 “Have you over listened to the 8.15 food talks” was answered by less housewives than were asked with the result that although there were only 629 “No” answers, the next Question 10 was answered by 695 housewives.

These answers were analysed into a number of groups about the same topics. In the breakdowns given by Class, Age, Family Size and Urban and Rural (Tables 1, 2, 4 and 5) there are seven groups but in the analysis “Without and With Children” (Table 3) a larger number of divisions has been made as this appeared appropriate.

The weighted totals show the following main points “Busy” and “Inconvenient Time” are the most important reasons for giving up listening, being 36.0% and 33.8% respectively; these results be related to other information about time in the supplement to Section 4. The only other large category is “Not Interested” with 16.2% of answers.

Breakdown by Class.

In the largest categories there are class differences; the A Class has the lowest proportion of “Busy” answers 28.6% compared with 41.5% in Class B. On the other hand A Class had 53.0% “Inconvenient Time” answers compared with Class D 23.3%. It is interesting to note that of the 186 A Class answers 53 were answers like “Too Early”,“Not up at that time”, whilst in Class D these answers were only 19 out of 142. Class D however, had a greater proportion of “Not Interested” answers 22.4% compared with 15.1% in Class A. (Table I).

Breakdown by Age

This breakdown shows two marked differences; the 35 to 50 years old group have a greater proportion of “Busy” answers than the Over 50 group 38.7% compared with 30.0%, and the Over 50 group gave a much greater proportion of “Inconvenient time” answers than the Under 35 group, 43% compared with 29.4% (Table 2)

Breakdown Without and With Children

This breakdown is given in detail to show that although in every sort of “Busy” answer the housewives with children have greater proportion of answers there are two categories which apply almost only to them; “Busy attending to Children - or baby” and “Busy getting Family to School or Work”. In the first case the housewives with children given 10.9% of these answers compared with 0.2% (one case) from housewives without children and in the second example the proportions are 7.6% to 1.3%. In contrast the housewives with children give a small proportion of answers to the effect that the time is inconvenient - particularly the answer “Not up Yet”! (Table 3)

Breakdown by Family Size

In this breakdown “Busy” answers are the greatest proportion in families with 5 mouths, 48.7% “Inconvenient Time” in families with 3 mouths 42.4% and “Not interested” in families with 2 mouths. These figures form an interesting complement to the results obtained from the breakdown by Class and Without and with Children. (Table 4).

Urban and Rural Breakdown .

There are no very clear differences in this analysis except that Rural housewives give a greater proportion of “Busy” answers than Urban, 42.5% compared with 33%. It should be noted however that the smallness of the rural sample makes these results of doubtful value. (Table 5).

Reasons for Giving up listening to the Kitchen Front Programme.

Question 12 was asked of those housewives who answered “No” to Question 11 “Do you still listen to them” (the 8.15 food talks). As in the case of Question 9 this question was answered by a less number of housewives than those to whom it applied with the result that although there were only 365 “No” answers to Question 11, 433 answers were obtained to Question 12.

These answers show a somewhat similar composition to those of Question 10, the two largest groups being “Too busy” and “Time inconvenient” 34.7% and 23.7% respectively of the weighted total.

The further breakdown by Class, Age and Without and With Children show similar features in the two large groups to those of Question 10. (Tables 6, 7 and 8). (Further breakdowns by Fuel, Family Size and Region are omitted as the numbers in the categories are too small to be meaningful.